Re: Some thoughts on a fortune
On 11/14/2001 09:39:54 AM Edward Betts wrote:
>> Vince Mulhollon <vlm@norlight.com> wrote:
>> > Another way of looking at it, is my three year old palm pilot with 10
meg
>> > memory expansion card comes within 1 to 10 percent of those various
specs,
>> > and it meets all my needs, so what is to gain by upgrading? I'll
never
>> > know the difference if it sorts my address book in 1 ns instead of 1
ms.
>> > That's why there's been approximately no technological progress in
palmtops
>> > for a couple years, no demand.
>>
>> NO DEMAND? I for one am very much looking forward to the day I can watch
full
>> colour hi-res movies trailers streaming in real-time over the net to my
PDA.
You can do that now, given alot of money and a winCE handheld from the last
three years.
I admit my error, sales (and returns) of those products seem to indicate
the demand is merely extremely low, as opposed to no demand. However,
demand seems quite high for the Palm pilot machines. Its one of those
interesting commodity products where higher tech does not equal higher
sales.
However, look at the economics of watching trailers on a PDA. A movie is
considered successful here if 1% of the population views it. By
definition, the other 99% don't think it's worth paying $10. I think it
would be a hard sell to convince the 99% that watching a small portion of
the movie (the trailer) on a tiny little screen with tinny sound is worth
purchasing several hundred dollars of equipment, if the entire movie on a
giant screen and great sound isn't even worth $10 to them. Of course if
you could watch those trailers for free or for $1 worth of equipment, maybe
that would be a killer app.
Back on the subject of Debian stuff, for similar reasons, I don't think
porting emacs to a palm III is going to be a killer app. But if someone
could port KDE to a PDA, and get kmail working usefully on the PDA, that
might be a killer app. After all, people pay $100 a month for those little
blackberry two way email pagers, I'm sure those same people would prefer to
pay less for a Debian based solution with a bigger screen...
On the other hand, very few people are paying $5 to cellphone providers to
"surf the web" on their telephones, so I'd assume a linux based wireless
web browser would tank in the market, so there's little point in porting
lynx to a Debian based PDA.
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